The US Department of Energy has announced recently that it currently owns the world's fastest supercomputer, the 'RoadRunner', designed and built to operate on video game console processors. The RoadRunner is allegedly capable of executing 1,000 trillion computations per second, or a petaflop, while the previous record was held by IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer, able to run 500 trillion calculations per second, 500 teraflops.

Therefore, the RoadRunner is twice as fast as the machine known up to now as the world's fastest supercomputer and at the same time the first computer to reach a processing power of one petaflop. The RoadRunner was built out of 13,000 PlayStation 3 Cell processors and 7,000 AMD Opteron processors and is housed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

After dominating the TOP500 list of world's fastest computers for several years, the BlueGene/L is finally dethroned. To give you an idea about the computational power of the RoadRunner supercomputer, the spokesperson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said that its overall daily power can be compared to 6 billion people using computers to make calculations every day for 46 years.

"Roadrunner will be used by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to perform calculations that vastly improve the ability to certify that the US nuclear weapons stockpile is reliable without conducting underground nuclear tests. Roadrunner will also contribute to solving our global energy challenges, and open new windows of knowledge in the basic scientific research fields", said the US DoE in a press statement.

The RoadRunner uses a Linux Red Hat operating system, covers a surface area of 1,100 square meters, became operational this month and was built by IBM. The computing cluster consists of 18 interconnected units.

Alternative uses for the RoadRunner supercomputer will involve areas such as science, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.